I Demand More Patriotic Comics, Damn It (Black and White and Startlingly Offensive All Over)

We’ve had a lot of interesting comments on the race and comics roundtable, some of which point in similar directions — so rather than going through and saying the same thing over and over, I thought I’d try to hit some main points in this post.

lso, we live in a Western Republic, founded by Europeans and still majority European ( not for long, I know). That entertainment and art follow, I don’t think we should be surprised by.

It’s not like we’re willing to go to Ireland and demand that they adapt the way they tell stories to make Eastern European immigrants feel more culturally powerful than they are.

This is more or less, I think, a variation on Pat Buchanan’s, “Traditional Americans Are Losing Their Nation, (though without the apocalyptic vision and the implicit clal to arms that makes Buchanan’s stance here truly execrable.) Basically, the argument is that we, as a nation, are white; that’s our cultural heritage, our true American European self, and so it’s natural to focus on that. Other traditions, or people, are extraneous to who we really are.

Andrew Sullivan had a fine rebuttal of this position:

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it’s so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England’s roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples – the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land – stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan’s or John Derbyshire’s fantasies.It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me – and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of – and attraction to – its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you’ve never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

And it’s not just that America’s black. America’s also Amerindian. And, of course, and very much so when you’re talking about comics, Jewish. In short, America is it’s own culture — and what’s most distinctly American about it is its syncretism. There’s nobody more American, as just one example, than Rosa Parks. Hers is a tale of the plucky salt of the earth overcoming the unjust vagaries of the fascist state. What’s more American than that?

So the plea for comics to stop being so unutterably, lamely pale isn’t a plea for them to be less American. It’s a suggestion that they be *more* American.

I know black comic fans. They’re nerds, just like a lot of white fans. I think to suggest to them that they require a black superhero, or a black creator to feel some kind of connection to that material is pretty insulting, and it’s just not evident. You can’t say that if comics were more minority friendly, more minorities would be involved. By that logic, white people, as a rule would be far more interested in comics than they are. They’re not. Comics are for children, slightly fucked up adults, or slightly pretentious fucked up adults.

Modern superhero comics, with few enough exceptions, are pretty dismal affairs that don’t really address anything of substance, and where any kind of risk-taking or experimentation is pretty soundly discouraged, for all sorts of economic reasons. Why should race be any different? I mean, if we’re talking about Supergirl, as the last post in this roundtable did, doesn’t a book like that have broader limitations and failings than just the failure to represent ethnic diversity properly? It’s rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

For both Uland and Ed, comics are essentially debased and irrelevant. Talking about race is therefore pointless, because only a select few fucked up individuals are going to read them anyway.

But…if everyone agrees that mainstream comics are an (ahem) ghetto of mediocrity…how did that happen? Why are they like that?

Let’s take a brief detour, and talk about another extremely white genre — country music. It’s not a secret especially why country is largely white. It’s because of systematic racism and segregation in the early part of the 20th century, when the genre was formed — and of the split between hillbilly and race records which was explicitly segregationist. It’s persisted because of genre coherence, white populism, and (I presume) black alienation because of white populism. It isn’t about dictats handed down from on high, necessarily, but it is about racism, and a history of racism.

Now, even though country was born out of segregation, it wasn’t actually European. It’s roots were as much in the blues and jazz as in Irish or European folk song, and even it’s instrumentation and vocal styles (from the banjo to Jimmie Rodgers) were integrated. And that’s where a lot of the genre’s energy came from; form a mixing of white and black styles which produced western swing and bluegrass and hillbilly boogie and rockabilly. After rock took over most of the syncretic energy of white pop, though, country kind of flailed, turning more and more to nostalgia, unable to assimilate the changes in black music (like rap) that were leading the way for pop. And as a result you got a lot of really shitty music (country is kind of trying in various ways now to make peace with black pop, and I think country radio is more listenable at the moment than it’s been in some time.)

The point of all that, I’d argue, at least, is that comics aren’t so insular that any discussion of race is irrelevant. Rather, they’re insular because they have, for a really long time now, more or less deliberately cut themselves off from vast swathes of audience and inspiration.

white male heroes must be heroic at all times. I never got that pressure when writing minority or female characters; they were “allowed” (mainly by lower editorial expectations, I think) to make more human decisions for more human reasons. It wasn’t that editors were either specifically racist or felt those characters should have greater emotional latitude.

Steven’s point is that expectation are lower for non-white characters, which is no doubt true. But I wonder if part of what he was experiencing was also just the kind of opening up of possibilities you can get when you start having conversations or interactions with other folks. Writing about somebody who is not all white all the time isn’t a big step, but it is a step towards the kind of cultural interplay that gave us bluegrass, and jazz, and fusion, and graffitti, and blaxploitation, and manga, and, for that matter, in many ways, Superman. That’s where the most exciting American creative endeavors have come from, always.

In this sense, Uland is precisely and staggeringly wrong when he claims that if people liked their own culture best, then there would be more white people reading comics. On the contrary, white Americans don’t read comics because *it’s not their culture.* It’s too white; it’s too boring; it’s too irrelevant and male and stodgy. White Americans, like all Americans, prefer things like, oh, say, pop music or rap music — art that mixes and matches influences and perspectives in exciting ways; that uses that mixing as a spur to the imagination.

In short, comics appeal to nobody and are irrelevant because they appeal to nobody, and are irrelevant. They sit there staring at their navels, and, as a result, the only folks who want to engage with them are people who want to sit around staring at their navels. This isn’t a problem for the culture at large — it’s not a “oh, no, comics are racist — it’s unjust!” On the contrary, it’s a problem *for comics.* When Vom Marlowe talks about being turned off by the blinding paleness of mainstream comics, she’s not talking as a member of the PC police, spoiling everyone’s fun. She’s talking as *a potential fan*, someone who has an interest in the medium and who feels excluded because the world she lives in and cares about and likes to interact with is being gratuitously ignored. And you know what? Most people feel like that, which is why comics are continuing their ongoing downward spiral into ever more pointlessly insular clusterfuckery.

23 Comments

Well written, Noah. I think the conflict between Sullivans' position and Buchanans' is that Sullivan is that they both have distinctly different ideas about what makes a Nation a Nation. Sullivan seems to be surveying the kind of mainstream, or street-level view of what this country might look like now . It's a really egalitarian vision; well, all these people sound sort of black, and listen to black music. So it's a pretty black country. Buchannan, as most Conservatives would, looks to the established Traditions that informed the institutions of State; where did the ideas that formed our founding documents come from? So they see these formations of State coming out of an organic accumulation of power; you have a mass that is ethnically similar, that shares similar religious beliefs and wants to defend itself from any/all that would oppose it. Conservatives have had a tough time in the U.S, by the way, because of its relative youth; it hasn't really formed "organically" in the sense that most older countries have. So Conservatism in America has become a form of Cowboy Liberalism.Anyhow, I tend to think that what we all recognize as established powers actually do have power. This is the whole premise of every egalitarian movement; we're not being given access to power. I think those established powers are firmly planted in Western traditions. And really, the only reason anyone could say that this nation is anything but Western is because these powers have given access. Someone like Buchannan identifies this as a suicidal move. I sort of agree, though I'm not so apocalyptic about it. So Sullivan can step in, decades later and tell us we're not a Western country.I think that we can maintain Western character without necessarily associating it directly with skin color or ethnic heritage. There is absolutely no reason to invite in more and more individuals who are less and less attuned to Western thought, however.

2. I don't think it's ever "pointless" to talk about race. I do think it's pointless to talk about race in the terms laid out by Von Marlowe for the reasons I mentioned already, and it's not because comics are bad.My point about white people not reading comics was misconstrued. I wrote that if you're suggesting more minorities would be into comics if there were more minority characters or creators, it follows to say that lots of white people would be into comics as they are now. But comics are not read by a general audience, or created by average people; you can't possibly extrapolate from the color of people in a crowd scene anything meaningful about "race" in comics.

Where is this assertion coming from that minorities really would, or really do want to engage with "comics"?What about the minority fans that are out there right now? What about the black artist that drew the institutionally racist comic? Have we even established that comics are, in fact, as "white" as everyone is claiming they are? How? Anecdotes? If they are, maybe the reasons have nothing to do with what's holding back Von Marlowe; maybe it's that black culture, Hispanic culture, etc., actually have developed in different ways; It's already uncool for a white boy in a white town to be into comics. You can get away with it cause you can hide out in your room, and your parents can drive you to a Comics shop or Barnes & Noble once a week with $20. Maybe that isn't a typical scenario in a lot of minority homes. Maybe it's even less cool among minority kids to be into comics. Maybe most of them have no use for them at all. Maybe that's okay. If you want to turn that tide, you need to create material that you think will speak to those being left out. TIME WARNER and DISNEY are doing just fine bringing minorities into the fold. If there were some kind of magic formula that would get the masses into comics again, I promise you, Noah, they'd be doing it right now. They don't know how, and they aren't interested. They're interested in creating material that people who're into comics are going to buy; it's a niche now, and it always will be.Have you checked out video games lately? I promise you, if I were 12 today, in twenty years I'd be writing on some kind of cranky gaming blog.

— Finally, I'm really not suggesting that comics stare at a wall and play with their navel. I'm saying that taking a pretty basic social justice M.O and prodding "comics" with it isn't going to accomplish much.

Perhaps where I'll nitpick with you Noah is the idea that comics declined into irrelevancy due to their lily whiteness. That certainly didn't help, but I think much bigger factors were the decline of the news-stand market and the emergence of additional forms of entertainment, like cable TV and video games.

And now I'm going to switch sides and nitpick ULAND's point. Comics are niche, but there's no reason they'd always have to be. Nobody expects Captain Marvel to start selling 40 million monthlies again, but there's always potential for some growth in any market. If comic shops aren't working, then try a different distribution method (the Internet, mail order subscription, bookstores, etc.). To their credit, Marvel and a few other publishers have been taking baby steps in this direction. But establishing new distribution methods won't count for shit unless there's content there that readers actually want, which is where's Noah's point comes into play.

Hey Uland. You've made your points at length, and that's cool. I wonder if you could dial it back somewhat at this point? I would just like other folks to feel they can comment without having it descend necessarily into an "all-against-Uland-all-the-time" affair (entertaining as that might be.)

I'm not planning on writing more as a response to your post— I couldn't prove you more wrong, at this point ( snap!)— but I'd like to respond to Richard:

—I agree that comics once were a mass medium. It is possible that that could happen again; like you I don't think it has to do with whiteness so much. Maybe it'd be fun to consider what it might take to actually become mass again. I kind of think that if you have some of the biggest movies ever being based on comics, and you're not seeing a significant jump in sales, it's going to be really difficult. It's not like you can get more into the mainstream than Spiderman, you know? I think the possibility that Comics as a mass medium were a blip on the screen; the technology, distribution, demographics, economics,etc., have simply changed, irrevocably. Those forces that nurtured the ascent of comics have changed shape.

I've been told that one of the reasons that American television is very successful abroad is that the production has already been paid for by American audiences, so it can offered cheap in foreign markets, with no risk to the studio.

That's probably relevant to the success of manga in America, where the trick is more to translate and print the material than to actually go through the time, effort, and risk of creating it. Manga is also pre market tested- if you will, with a foreign audience. While we might not know which manga will catch on here, we do know which manga is of professional quality.

I think its been mentioned here that Disney is anecdotally fairly popular with minorities. I suppose Disney has gradually gotten more minority friendly since the 90s.

I think if Disney had a business model that revolved around more Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Snow White movies each ear, we might find that is similarly stale and not minority friendly.

The fact that the American comic business model revolves around exploiting creators from the 40s, 50s, and 60s is rather relevant, i believe.

Manga characters tend to be created recently and only run a few years, marketed to the culture of their time.

I think the problems with comics are largely based on the business model and economics.

Christopher Priest seems to think that, basically, there's really no competent person running any of the major comic book companies. I can sort of buy this, because comics are a huge afterthought to these corporations,who really make any profits of note from media licensing. (he has a different read on the viability of corporate owned characters than I do)

Quoting him again:

"Meanwhile, there’s this huge minority market—Latinos and African Americans—that is also virtually ignored. There is more money to be made, in the Latino community alone, than in the comics business as a whole. But, for reasons that, I suppose, seem reasonable to somebody, the industry has made almost no effort to break into the Latino market. So far as I know, there is no Spanish edition of Spider-Man here, and initiatives into the multi-billion-dollar African American market have likewise been negligible.

It’s worth mentioning that, in both of these enormous and largely untapped markets, the industry’s star system would be completely meaningless. Stop almost any black kid on the street and ask him who Mark Millar is. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. Now, ask him who Spider-Man is.

But nobody’s trying to sell little black kids Spider-Man Comics. The industry is trying to sell grown white men Mark Millar Comics. Which misses the point that Marvel’s legacy is not Mark Millar but Spider-Man. And producing comics for a minority market would cost considerably less because you don’t have to negotiate huge contracts with The Name. You can get back to doing what you should have been doing all along—introducing the wealth of your wonderful legacy to a new generation of readers."

Though any discussion where any assumption's made about "minorities" and what they–as if they are just a big group of same–want or "expect" is problematic, I do think there's a really good point to be expounded upon when it comes to black and latino youth and comics.

Namely, that kids love Manga and so indeed, one of comics' issue for kids, even white ones, is not grabbing them at all. This was sorta touched on though.

What's missing here and connects to Priest quoted by Pallas is that though a "little black kid" doesn't know Millar, he knows Spiderman, he isn't reading Spiderman either…and that's a bummer.

Comics for kids, like toys (as in action figures not PSP Go!s) are much more connected to middle-class and lower-middle class kids and the same is and could be true for comics. I'm sure I'm inching into territory for people to label me presumptive, but… the poor of our country are working/lower-class whites (or "rednecks"/"white trash" as we're all allowed to call them) and working/lower-class blacks and latinos.

There's a million reasons for this interest in toys or comics, but it has a lot to do with pragmatism (if you're a poor kid, you better be into comics or toys b/c you're not getting a PSP) and just a cultural expectations/norms, etc. There's a deeper sense of community and traditionalism in lower/middle-class families than upper middle class and upper class families for the most part.

I know for me, my interest in comics did indeed stem in part from being the child of parents who were poor-as-fuck and had me at 17 and so, an Archie Ninja Turtles comic at 1.25 once a week or so, didn't wreck their wallets. A new Nintendo game did. You smell me???

The poorer the area, the more kids buying comics. Unfortunately where and how they can buy comics is severely limited by the poor-ness of that area too.

That doesn't mean we need to have a Latino hero or a Black hero to market to them, but it doesn't mean we need to mostly have token minority characters either and you know, doing it sincerely and realistically would be a dope idea.

And a rolling, fits-our-multicultural-U.S.A view of the Marvel or DC universe though could be really cool.

But that's secondary to the problem of comics not appealing to kids of any "class" or "color" and the many reasons why.

But it's also a separate problem because indeed, it would not be hard at all to actually touch on this market of minorities and it's a matter of ignorance and comics eating itself that this has not been done.

The simple truth is…if comics were more available (for sale, as they used to be, in convenience stores, supermarkets, gas stations) and cheaper ($1.50 instead of $3.99), they could become a mass medium again. They will never be as "mass" as they once were—but if you give a kid a Marvel Adventures Spiderman comic (all-ages, story complete in one issue), he (yes, usually he) will read it and like it. This is true for kids who don't read, don't like to read, and have no interest in reading matter whatsoever. I know this because I've done it. But I gave the stuff away. Kids today have no clue where to buy a comic, and would be unlikely to if it costs $4.00 a pop. Comics can still be made cheaper (cheaper paper!) and are, as they are, cheaper than other entertainment options. IF they were available and appealing, kids would buy them. I'm sure of that—if the product is appealing (like Marvel Adventures). I see kids gathered around both manga AND superhero comics in my local library. I see kids everywhere dressed up as superheroes. And while it's true that literacy (and print matter) are on the wane, not the wax in this country–reading simple superhero comics is simply not that big a chore.

I keep wondering why American comics don't try something like the manga monthlies. I mean, it would be a ton cheaper, and you'd get a lot more gateway drug purchases. (You know, you read something accidentally and then are hooked.)

I wonder how successful Shojo Beat is here? Shonen Jump seems to do very well, and I think Viz has had a lot of success with the SJ titles.

I believe that (A) Shojo beat was out-selling most American comics by a wide margin

(B) before the American version was cancelled.

And, y'know, I think we can safely reverse some of these arguments. I'm a white nerd who's favorite group of Mainstream comics from the last few decades was the Milestone line. Comic publishers seem to adopt a "minorities don't sell" line, but I'm wondering if this is a bit of a sell-fulfilling prophecy.

I think those anthologies are problematic because its awkward to reread them in magazine form, in japan everyone just throws the magazines out, but that might require mass readership to make the magazine cheap enough for this to be practical.

I think Vom's idea of doing a marvel adventures style superhero anthology book for kids is a great one, where all of the stories are self contained, which would make rereading them less awkward.

Then again, Valiant, in the NES days, released an anthology featuring Mario, Link, Captain N, etc, distributed in Toys R US, which I read as a kid, but it doesn't seem to have changed the world, or lasted very long:

Hey, I was quoted. Anyway, just to be clear, I didn't suggest (or mean to suggest) that "comics are essentially debased and irrelevant." I don't think comics as an artform are debased, by any means — why would I be reading a comic blog if I thought that? But I do think that mainstream superhero comics are (mostly) "debased and irrelevant." And thus talking about the treatment of race in something like Supergirl or silly old Fantastic Four issues, while somewhat interesting — and I have enjoyed these posts a lot — is also kind of pointless. Like, these comics are bad in so many other ways, is it really surprising that they're also bad when it comes to race? The best way to deal with Supergirl, in my opinion, is to pretty much ignore it and read something better. Which is not to say that everything I'd call better is necessarily without its own race problems. It just seems like, if Marvel and DC somehow "fixed" the race issues you identify in these comics, well, the comics as a whole would still suck. They'd just have more black faces in the crowds.

Hey Ed! Yes, I should have made it clear everyone was talking about mainstream comics specifically. I think there's some partially analogous arguments to be made about comics as a whole, maybe….but that's a whole nother kettle of fish….

Silver and Bronze age comics had much greater appeal to non-whites because they didn't treat urban poor people as tragic junkies or things to kick through windows when you want information (see every issue of Miller's Daredevil).

Its connected to history – the Reagan years (and later the end of the cold war) saw a lot of comics adopt the uglier, near-fascistic ideology of contemporary action movies. Goodbye Shang Chi – hello The Punisher. It was exasperated by the whole 'dark age' schtick which combined Miller's 'Death Wish'/Ayn Rnd morality, with a generation of creators who failed to see the subtler of the 'British invasion'. What was politically eccentric in Ditko's Mr. A became the norm by the mid-80s.

Minstream comics never recovered their more general/younger audience – its readers are now relegated to dweebs who harbour nasty fantasies of blowing away the unsavoury 'rabble' (or threateningly non-white). Not unlike Miller's comics, really – except he's managed to make millions of dollars from it.

I think it's a stretch to argue that silver age comics were particularly more popular with minorities because of the way they dealt with class….I mean, comics in the past were more popular with everybody (which had more to do with all ages and lack of continuity porn than with the way they handled class, I think.)